Award Date
5-15-2018
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
English
First Committee Member
Claudia Keelan
Second Committee Member
Donald Revell
Third Committee Member
Emily Setina
Fourth Committee Member
Anita Revilla
Number of Pages
84
Abstract
This thesis, titled Before and After Her Body, is a full-length poetry manuscript submitted for completion of the Master of Fine Arts – Creative Writing Program. This collection delves into several interconnected themes, including gender, the female body, myth, legacy, and time. Broken into three main sections, these poems build from an examination of women as physical bodies to an exploration of women in conversation with other women and with themselves.
In these poems, characters from myth and popular culture blend with the persona of the narrator, who is at once an observer and a participant, discovering her own tradition and herself in past, present, and future lives.
In The Uses of the Body, Deborah Landau writes, “The uses of the body,/ you see where they end.// But we are only in the middle,/ only midway.” If she was discussing the physical body, then these poems are interested in the manifold body: physical, spiritual, inside and outside space and time and forever reimagining itself. They ask us to question our own perceptions and how we are perceived.
Keywords
body; gender; myth; poetry
Disciplines
Creative Writing
File Format
Degree Grantor
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Language
English
Repository Citation
Austin, Shannon, "Before and After Her Body" (2018). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 3210.
http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/13568364
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/